


No One Can Blame You For Walking Away

by Zetared



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-02
Updated: 2019-07-02
Packaged: 2020-06-03 00:04:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,067
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19452274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zetared/pseuds/Zetared
Summary: It’s only forever. Not long at all.





	No One Can Blame You For Walking Away

**Author's Note:**

> Title and synopsis yoinked from David Bowie’s “Underground.”

Anathema once, laughingly, accuses Crowley of being a boomerang. “You leave,” she says, nodding her agreement with herself, “but you always come back to him.”

Crowley regrets, in that moment, going to the effort of making human friends. Doesn’t matter that it’s been a few decades since he’d bothered and that it seems more important than ever to make proper interpersonal connections now that he and Aziraphale have officially severed ties with their respective authorities. Humans are too much trouble. Humans are nosy. Humans are rude. Humans go all red-cheeked and cheeky when drunk.

Well, all right. Maybe that’s just Anathema. 

Newt, conversely, seems to know his place. Bless--er, well, whatever--the man. “I’m sure Mr. Crowley knows what’s what,” he tells Anathema, solidly. 

Crowley suspects that Newt--much cheaper of a date than his girlfriend and considerably more tipsy--actually has no idea what they’re talking about, anymore, but the demon decides to appreciate the man’s vote of confidence regardless. 

“I do not--I am not a boomerang,” Crowley protests. “M’not--I do not.”

Anathema seems to take his protest as valid. She goes quiet a moment and then shrugs. “Fine, you’re right. It’s not a strong metaphor, in this case. Oh! I know. You’re in orbit.”

“Orbit?” Crowley asks. He understands space. He built a bit of it, after all. “What d’you mean?”

Anathema makes wobbly shapes in the air with her hands. “Like that. He’s here, you’re there. You, you...circle. In a track. And sometimes you’re far away. And sometimes you’re very close. But you don’t touch.”

Crowley makes a small, wounded noise. He doesn’t like the sound of that one bit. “Yeah,” he agrees, sadly. “S’true.”

Newt pats his knee clumsily, all thumbs and sweaty palms and fingernails in persistent need of trimming, and pours him another glass.

\--

A part of him--a rather large, needy, stupid part--had thought things might change after the Apoca-lapse. Their path had seemed finally clear, all the detris of their difficult histories, their questionable associations swept away by the gale force of Adam’s declaration and the combined terror of Above and Below. Adam had told all of the legions of Heaven and Hell to scarper, and Aziraphale and Crowley’s trick with the body swap had sealed the deal.

Surely, then, surely--.

But Crowley had gone to Aziraphale’s ‘shop the next day, full to bursting with expectations, and had his bubble summarily burst mere minutes after stepping through the door.

“Oh, I’m afraid not,” the angel had said, stiff as an over starched shirt. “I’ve quite a lot to do, today. Goodbye.”

Subsequent attempts have left Crowley in the same dismal position. A succession of unanswered phone calls and sidestepped invitations trail behind him like footsteps in the sand. 

Anathema has a sharp tongue and a short temper. But at least she’s sympathetic no matter how many times she finds herself forced to peel Crowley off her cottage floor and toss him unceremoniously onto her sofa to sleep it off (or miracle himself sober, if he’s coherent enough to do so before falling asleep).

When he’s not haunting Tadfield like a dismal spectre, Crowley sprawls out on his oversized bed and sleeps away the hours in between pathetic attempts at contact with Aziraphale. And, all the while, the angel remains out of his reach--on the farthest reaches of their elliptical orbit and spiraling farther still with every revolution until, perhaps, they’ll be untethered from each other entirely, floating out into the void.

\-- 

Crowley’s phone wakes him up, vibrating as it does right off his nightstand.

“Fgh? ‘Lo?”

“I’ve been thinking about what you said.”

Crowley sits bolt upright at the sound of Aziraphale’s voice. He rubs a hand over his eyes. How long as he been asleep? Feels like days. Very well might be.

“I’ve said a lot of things,” Crowley replies, going for easy, going for casual, going for cool. “What d’you mean, specifically?”

“I’ve been thinking about eternity,” Aziraphale says. His tone belies nothing about how he might be feeling, currently. “Will you come over?”

“Yeah,” Crowley says, already rolling off the bed and snapping on a set of clean clothes, forcing his ravaged bedhead into shape. “Give me just a mo’.”

He’s never driven quite so fast from his apartment to the bookshop, before. It’s a miracle (quite literally) that the rubber doesn’t burn right off his tyres.

\--

He feels empty-handed as he walks through the door, ignoring both the closed sign and the lock. Usually in this kind of situation, Crowley would bring the angel a gift--old book, nice bit of something from his favorite bakery, something to that effect. But those are for apologies, mostly. They haven’t even been arguing, this time. Have they? Crowley didn’t mean to be, if he was.

“Angel?”

Aziraphale’s head pops out from the back room. “Hello. I’m making tea. Do you--?”

“Yeah, all right,” Crowley agrees, because it gives him something to say besides ‘what are you playing at, exactly?’ or ‘I’ve missed you, you know,’ or ‘is this the end for us, finally? Is it over before it’s even begun?’

What does it mean for an angel to start thinking--really thinking--about eternity? And what on earth had Crowley said about it that was so worth remembering?

Aziraphale presses a warm mug of tea into Crowley’s hands hardly before he’s even quite crossed the threshold. A bit of the liquid threatens to spill but then doesn’t because neither demon nor angel expect it to do so, no matter how much force might be applied.

“Oh, uhm, sit down,” Aziraphale says, even as Crowley is already settling in to the same chair he’s occupied hundreds of times without invitation, by now.

Crowley raises his eyebrows at the angel. He’s tempted, for a moment, to take off his sunglasses, to really let Aziraphale see him...but, no. No, better not.

“It’s rather long, isn’t it, eternity?” Aziraphale blurts out. His cheeks are rosy with embarrassment, his blue eyes darting around in a frantic dance, avoiding Crowley, especially.

“As far as I understand it,” Crowley says.

“Quite long.”

“Endless.”

“Right.”

A silence falls. Crowley sloshes his tea around in his cup, just daring it to slop over the side. 

“It’s all the good for them, isn’t it?” Aziraphale says. 

“Them?”

“The humans. Eternity. It’s not something they, er, consider all that much. Outside of their immortal souls, that is. I mean that they don’t have to worry, do they, about--about how long forever is…?”

Crowley frowns. “Aziraphale--?”

“It’s a very long time.”

“We’ve established that,” Crowley agrees, lips still downturned in his confusion. He’s starting to feel especially nervous, now. “What’s this about?”

“You--oh, my dear. Wouldn’t you get awfully bored, after a while? You’re hardly the type to-to-settle down, are you?”

Cowley sucks in a sharp, painful breath. He swallows down a mouthful of still-warm tea to keep from choking on the sudden lump expanding in his chest. Purposefully, he clears his throat. He tries and fails to meet Aziraphale’s wandering eyes. “I dunno,” the demon says, his voice only a whisper. “I’ve done pretty well, so far”

A pause.

Crowley puts his teacup aside. He hesitates a moment but then, slowly, deliberately, he leans over the expanse of Aziraphale’s desk and takes one of the pale, fluttering hands he finds resting there. “Six thousand years is nothing to sneeze at, you know. Six thousand more--six times as much--wouldn’t make much difference, to me.”

“Really?” Aziraphale says, rather awed. “For all that time?”

Crowley’s lips twist into a self-deprecating grimace. “Oh, give or take an hour or so, I suppose.”

“I’m sorry,” Aziraphale breathes. “I should have--well. Suffice to say, it took me a bit longer.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Crowley assures him. “Like you said. Eternity is a long time. Plenty of opportunity to make it up to me.”

Aziraphale’s eyes have stopped their pacing. He has his gaze--wide-eyed, slack jawed--fixated on their entangled fingers. It’s not the first time they’ve held hands, not the first time they’ve traded a significant touch (six thousand years is, truly, a very long time--far too much time to waste), but there’s something about this particular press of palm-to-palm that matters more.

“I thought maybe you were done with me. With--with you and me, I mean,” Crowley says. It’s a hard, painful thing to admit, especially when he’s not entirely sure he’s wrong, yet.

Aziraphale’s eyes snap to his. He frowns, brows drawing in. “Why would you ever--?”

Crowley would glance pointedly at a calendar, if there was one to glance at. As it is, he just shrugs. “Lots of time, lately, spent all on my own.”

“I was _thinking_ about things,” Aziraphale says, tone shifting toward the defensive.

Crowley says nothing to that. He turns their hands, forcing Aziraphale’s hand to rest its weight on top of his own. His knuckles dig into the wood of the old, book-covered desk, and the pressure stings in a warm, correct kind of way.

“I don’t want to--I would rather not disappoint you, you see.” Tentatively, Aziraphale’s thumb ghosts over the prominent base knuckle of Crowley’s own.

Crowley smirks a bit at that. “Wouldn’t be the first time, would it?”

“No. But it could very well be the last. And I couldn’t stand that, Crowley. I really couldn’t. That’s what I mean, you see, about eternity.”

“I wouldn’t worry. S’meant to go on and on, eternity. Like you and me.”

Aziraphale’s drawn face smooths out into a flicker of teeth, a brief glimmer of a hopeful smile. He speaks with the same relief as he expressed six thousand years ago just before the first ever storm. “Oh, do you think so? It’s been bothering me.”

“Anathema says I’m a boomerang,” Crowley informs him. “I’ll always come back.”

“So you do,” Aziraphale agrees, a thousand thousand tiny moments flashing through his long memory. It’s never easy, remembering the details of such a long life--but he remembers Crowley quite clearly, always appearing out of the firmament exactly at the right time.

“Wouldn’t hurt, though, to have you meeting me in the middle, once in a while.”

“Yes,” Aziraphale agrees. He leans forward, using his free fingers to pluck the sunglasses off of Crowley’s nose. They stare eye-to-eye for a long, quiet beat. “I’ll do my best.”

“Of course you will. Could hardly do anything but, could you?”

“Not quite a professional requirement, these days,” Aziraphale reminds him. “But I’ll make an effort.” They both lean close, now, drawn together with all the force of two complementary magnets. 

Crowley has a feeling their orbit is about to shatter, afterall--just not in the way he had previously feared.

\--

“In a covalent bond,” Anathema is saying, slurring a bit over the word ‘covalent,’ “the atoms share electron pairs. Strongest bond. Balances the attractive and repulsive.”

Crowley gently grabs her hand, steering it so that the bottle within pours into her glass and not down the front of her skirt. “Mhm?”

“Overlapping orbitals,” Anathema adds, as if that helps to clarify it.

“To overlapping orbitals,” Newt agrees, but it’s the tenth or so random toast he’s made in the night, so it hardly has much weight to it.

Aziraphale stretches an arm over Crowley’s back and pulls him in until the demon falls to the side, resting his full weight against the angel’s soft, warm body. “Indeed,” Aziraphale agrees, tilting his glass toward Newt approvingly before taking a long sip.

Crowley turns his head into the worn surface of Aziraphale’s waistcoat, grinding his cheek against the buttons, breathing the scent of the angel’s new-ish cologne in, committing the scent to memory as he’s already done dozens of times before. 

For a brief moment, he nearly understands it, nearly feels what Anathema means by the exchange of pieces, of slotting so firmly together that separation is no longer feasible on a molecular level. But maybe it’s always felt like that, actually. Probably always has. Probably always will.

Crowley’s quite a fan of eternity, these days, when it comes right down to it. 

Aziraphale starts humming “Edelweiss” under his breath, because he is, as ever, an utter bastard. Crowley laughs and laughs all the harder when Newt--again far too soused to be entirely present in the conversation--blearily starts to sing along.

\--

Fin


End file.
